Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Our neighbors' lambs are
being born here in Vermont now, and soon it will be lambing time in Iceland
too. I remember one Icelandic friend of mine, sad that they were giving up
sheep-farming, say, “But it won’t be spring without lambs bouncing around.”

I’ve never been in Iceland
during lambing time, but when I went to Greenland to see Eirik the Red’s Viking
settlement there in May 2006, the people who lived on Eirik’s old farm,
Brattahlid, were in the middle of lambing season. They had learned their
craft—and bought their sheep—in Iceland, and were trying to recreate (with
government help) the Viking economy.

Jacky of Blue Ice Explorers
warned me, when he rented a cottage for me on a Greenlandic farm, that I
wouldn’t see much of the farmers, and I didn’t. They were hardly sleeping, two
needing to be in the sheep house twenty-four hours a day. But one day I did
get a tour of the barn. My hostess, Ellen, was small and patient and proud of
her sheep. When she spoke—to me in English, to her kids in Greenlandic—her
voice was soft and even, and she raised it only slightly in surprise when a
young ram butted the housedoor with a bang. She slipped out and grabbed his
horns before calling to me to follow.

The ram, nearly as big as she,
was a yearling, bottlefed last May because he was born too small. “Now he won’t
stay with the other sheep,” Ellen explained. “He likes to come in the house.
Watch out he doesn’t hurt you.”

Holding tight to both of his
impressively curled horns, she dragged him off the porch and through a muddy
stream to the barn, then waved me inside before shooing him away.

The high, wide barn was
divided lengthwise into five aisles, each about six feet wide and filled with
sixty jostling, curious, pregnant ewes. We walked between two aisles on a
raised boardwalk, which was also where the sheep’s noontime hay was piled (and
the dogs were napping). It smelled very sweet. Ellen’s husband Carl and a
helper were busy in the aisles, both slim, short, dark, sweaty, and tired. Carl
had a wide, open face and a brightness to his expression, as if he’d like to
speak to me but couldn’t, knowing no English. Instead he merely smiled, hopped
nimbly up out of the pen in front of me and stretched up to the rafters to
fetch down a wooden grate that he then slipped into grooves in the sides of the
aisle to separate off a ewe and her two lambs. The far end of the aisle, I
noticed, was already divided that way all along its length into little ewe-and-lamb-sized
pens.

“There,” Ellen nudged me and
pointed toward our feet.

A birth-slick white lamb lay
sprawled on the aisle floor, glistening, two ewes competing to lick it dry.
“Will the others step on it?” I asked.

“Only if they are scared,”
she said, and I held very still until Carl reached it. The new lamb’s fleece by
then was just starting to curl. Carl lifted it carefully by its head and
carried it down the aisle to make it a pen, both ewes anxiously trotting behind
him. He held the grate high for a moment until only one ewe was on the lamb’s
side, then quickly slid it into place, leaving the second ewe trapped, baahing
miserably, outside.

“How does he know which one is
the mother?” I asked.

“Its rear end is bloody. And
the other one is fatter.”

Off the back of the barn was
a spacious shed carpeted with hay, to which the lambs graduated in groups of
ten or so when they were strong enough. There, Ellen said, they “learned to
find their mothers” before being taken up to the mountain pastures and let
loose until October, when they are rounded up, sorted, and sent by boat to the
slaughterhouse.

It’s a short, but sweet,
life for mountain-raised lamb.

If you want to visit the Viking sites in Greenland, I
recommend Blue Ice Explorer at http://www.blueice.gl/ in south
Greenland. Greenland doesn’t export lamb, as far as I know, but you can often buy Icelandic
mountain-raised lamb at Whole Foods; on their website, read “The Tender Story of Icelandic Lamb.” It’s the wild thyme and other herbs they graze on all summer
that makes it so delicious.

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

When I write about Iceland--or wherever I travel--I try to avoid sounding judgmental. I'm there to learn, to see something new. I hate the current fashion of snarky travel-writing and had always thought it something rather modern.

It's not. Here's a description of the inside of an Icelandic turfhouse--especially the main room or badstofa--from a report on leprosy in Iceland filed in 1895 by Dr. Edward Ehlers. (Thanks to Jack in Colorado for sending me this):

"The Badstofa has six to eight fixed bedsteads, or rather large wooden boxes, each box intended for two or three persons, who usually sleep head against feet and feet against head.

"If you enter this Badstofa when 13 to 14 persons lie sleeping there, first of all you feel a temperature which certainly both summer and winter reminds you of the tepidarium of a Roman bath, but surely here the likeness ceases. A suffocating stink and an unwholesome smell meets you. It is the smell of the mouldy hay, of the sheepskin quilts that are never dried or aired; it is the smell of the dirt which is dragged into the house on the clumsy Icelandic skin shoes that want double soles, and are quite unqualified to keep out the dampness.

"In this dirt a confused mixture of cats, dogs, and children lie reeking on the floor, exchanging caresses and echinococci; it is the smell of the wet stockings and the woollen shirts which hang to dry next to a slice of dried halibut ("Rekling") or the dried cod's head--this dreadful irrational favourite dish, for which the Icelander pays four kroner (4s. 6d.) a hundred. And if you poke your nose into the corners of the Badstofa, you will find a bucket in which the urine of the whole party is gathered; it is considered good for wool-washing.

"I shall never succeed in picturing all the details of such an interior, which, in addition, you may imagine as being heated in the winter, at the places where they have no turfs, with the sheep's dried excrements, a kind of fuel which spreads a penetrating smell of nitre and burnt wool."

Dr. Ehlers was in Iceland to research the causes of leprosy. His conclusion: "It is the absolute want of cleanliness plus Armauer Hansen's bacillus, which in such an interior finds its true paradise." You can read his whole essay in Newman, Ehlers, and Impey, Prize Essays on Leprosy (London: New Sydenham Society, 1895), pp 169-70, available on Open Library.

If you want to visit a badstofa, I recommend the one pictured above, from the Skagafjord Heritage Museum at Glaumbaer in northern Iceland. It was the home of Gudrid the Far-Traveler, heroine of my nonfiction book, The Far Traveler. If you visit Glaumbaer, be sure to say hi to Sirri for me. And don't miss the opportunity to try the fish soup in the museum restaurant.

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

I stayed in Greenland’s tiny capital city, Nuuk, for
two weeks in 2006, while researching my book The Far Traveler. My hosts were Kristjana,
an Icelander, and her husband, Jonathan Motzfeldt, an Inuit known as the
“father of his country” for having negotiated Greenland’s semi-independence
from Denmark. Jonathan was prime minister of the Home Rule government for many
years and remained a significant voice in politics when I met him; he died in
2010. Here’s how I remember him:

One night over tea and
cookies, we watched a Greenlandic TV program about independence, on which he
was featured. I asked if he was in favor of it. “Someday,” he replied, “but not
in my time.” Although ninety percent of Greenland’s people are indigenous Inuit,
Danish subsidies, he explained, built Greenland’s airports and public
buildings, including the new university complex going up next to the Institute
of Natural Sciences, where Kristjana works. Half of the Home Rule government’s
expenditures come from Denmark—and nearly half of Greenland’s workers are
government employees. Initiatives the Danes are backing include mining for
gold, extracting low-temperature enzymes from glacial lakes, bottling glacier
water, tourism and archaeology, and—harking back to the Viking era—sheep
farming.

For dinner, Jonathan had
boiled a joint from a sheep raised on Eirik the Red’s farm—an old sheep, he said, his dark face lit
with a cartoonish grin. He repeated it several times, with emphasis, “Eirik the
Red’s ooooold sheep.” He seemed to be
testing the extent of my American fussiness (later he would serve boiled
eiderduck and noisily enjoy sucking the duck’s feet). But I knew he was
teasing. I had taken to him the first time we met. Trim and neat, he turned
Kristjana into a giant: he hardly came up to her ear. His smile was as sunny as
a child’s—and as apparently irrepressible. Appropriately solemn-faced
discussing the eight suicides Nuuk had seen in the two weeks since I had
arrived in Greenland, he was beaming again as soon as Kristjana changed the
subject. Now, he served the sheep broth first, tiny potatoes and rice floating
in it, then put the big, dry, chewy hunk
of grayish meat and bone, glistening with little white globs of fat, on a
platter. He handed me a penknife and a glass of red wine.

One perk of Jonathan’s
position was the Motzfeldt’s house: high, glass-fronted, it overlooked the bay
like the prow of a ship. At the breakfast table one morning, his pipe curled in
a meaty fist, Jonathan shouted out, “There!” and “There!,” picking out herds of
seal as they swam by. Through binoculars, I saw a flurry of little triangular
flippers and smooth black backs before they dove again. Another day, reading a
book on Greenland from the Motzfeldts’ excellent library, I was startled to my
feet by the Hoosh-Wash of a whale
breaching. Hurrying outside, I hung over the cliffside with a neighbor and her
two children to see four more jets and a pair of flukes.

Each morning before the fog
burned off, a flotilla of small boats would etch silver lines away from the
harbor. There was no other way to get out of town, I’d soon learned, unless you
flew.

“Do you notice all the boats
are going into the fjords?,”
Kristjana said wistfully one day. She ran a hand through her blonde, boy-cut
hair and took a drag on her cigarette. “That’s where spring is.”

I had been introduced to
Kristjana by an Icelandic friend, a botanist who worked with her in southern
Greenland on a project to stem erosion caused by the sheep farming. Learning of
my plans to visit the Viking sites near Nuuk, Kristjana had immediately volunteered
to take me there, but the Motzfeldts’ boat had gone in for repairs in November,
just after we started planning our trip, and being “father of your country”
doesn’t unfortunately get your boat fixed any sooner in Nuuk. Greenland,
Kristjana agreed, was mis-named. It should have been called “Maybe-Land.”

“Maybe you can go to Sandnes
with Georg on Tuesday.” Georg Nyegaard, a Danish archaeologist working at the
National Museum of Greenland, was going to inspect a farmer’s potato patch near
the Viking site: Greenland has no private property; every individual use of
land is approved and monitored by a government committee, and the museum
officials suspected this potato patch was encroaching on the archaeology.

“Maybe we can go with the
Swedish ambassador,” Kristjana said another day. “He said he’d like to see
Sandnes. His yacht is luxury, much
better than our boat—except that one motor is broken.”

Tupilak Travel had a boat
going to a different spot known for Viking ruins—down the fjord just north of
Nuuk—but the trip was cancelled at the last moment: The wind was too strong.

By the time the Motzfeldt’s
boat was finally ready, Jonathan had been called away to Copenhagen and
Kristjana was drowning in things to do before she herself left for Italy a few
days later. So she turned me and the boat over to Tobias, whom she introduced
as Jonathan’s chauffeur.

“You have a map, you know
where you want to go, good, good,” she said, brushing away my doubts. “Tobias
will get you there”—despite the fact that he spoke no English (or Icelandic)
and I spoke no Greenlandic (or Danish). His wife Rusina would be going, too, I
learned when I met them at the boat early Saturday morning. “Beautiful!” she
said, with an expansive wave of one hand, as we passed the dramatic mountains
that marked the harbor mouth. It was her favorite (and almost her only) English
word.

But we did get to the Viking
ruins at Sandnes—you can read about it in The
Far Traveler—and we did, in spite of the strengthening wind and the
growling sea, get safely back.

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Did you know it's "Read an e-book week"? To celebrate, my first book, A Good Horse Has No Color: Searching Iceland for the Perfect Horse, published in 2001 and long out of print, is now on sale for 50% off at Smashwords.com. That's $4.99. Can't pass it up at that price.

A Good Horse Has No Colorhas always been popular with Icelandic horse owners. But much of what I write applies to any breed of horse. This excerpt, for example, about my first ride on my horse Birkir in Iceland, was reprinted in the coffee-table book Heartbeat for Horses by Laura Chester and Donna Demari in 2007:

...Behind me I heard a rise in the conversation, then hoofbeats. The woman rode up on the darker horse and handed me her whip. I had seen other Icelanders ride with one, longer than a riding crop but a bit short for a dressage whip. This one had an engraved silver cap on its handle. I took it like I had expected it, and gave the horse a tap. Immediately he picked up a nice slow tolt, as if he’d been merely waiting for me to ask. It was a confident gait: His back felt soft and rounded and comfortable beneath me, his head was high, and his neck arched. His forelock blew back past his ears, and his dark mane rippled over my hands. He seemed to be enjoying himself, glad to be about, though not in any great hurry. I must have been smiling too, for the woman looked at me and beamed. She said something I didn’t catch, and suddenly we were cantering up the hill. The horse had a fine, rolling canter. At the crest, we resumed the tolt, turned, cantered up the near hill, and tolted back to the barnyard. The horse stopped easily next to its fellow, and we got off. The rain was picking up again. Someone took the two horses into the stable. Another suggested coffee, and we all dashed for the house.

When we came back out, the rain was still steady, but inside the barn it was warm and brightly lit and comforting. A raised center aisle separated two large pens full of horses, each haltered and clipped to a rail. They stirred and stamped when we entered, and I looked along their orderly ranks for Birkir. Amazingly, I picked him out at once, the light bay with a star, and walked down the aisle toward him feeling as if he were already mine. Sigrun approached him from the rear, and the horses parted, leaving room for me to step into the pen and join her. We stood at his flank, looking him over, and he turned his head to watch us, his neck arced high, his ears pricked with curiosity. He had a dark, liquid, inquisitive eye, soft and friendly. Unlike Elfa, he was completely at ease around us. He did not sidle away when I reached to pat him—on the contrary, he poked his nose forward, dog-like, to the limits of his rope, as if looking for attention. I scratched behind his ears and ran my hand down his neck and along his smooth wide back. His mane and tail were thick and dark, his black stockings neat, his hooves well-shaped, his coat a glowing red. He seemed larger and sturdier than most Icelandics I’d seen, and it was clear he was in excellent health.

“He’s beautiful,” I said, and meant it. I was filled with desire, suddenly, to own this beast—filled with awe that it was possible to own a creature so fine, so alive—surprised that anyone would actually let me take him away…

Birkir fra Hallkelsstadahlid has been part of our family now for fifteen years. You can visit his home farm on the web at www.hallkelsstadahlid.is. To learn about Icelandic horses in general, go to the Icelandic Horse Congress's website at www.icelandics.org or take a virtual ride on my friend Stan Hirson's video blog, Hestakaup.com. Another good way to get to know Icelandic horses is by reading my friend Pamela Nolf's blog about her horse Blessi: blessiblog.blogspot.com.

Finally, a nice surprise in my email this week was a note from 16-year-old Asha Brogan, who created a book trailer for A Good Horse Has No Color as an assignment for her high-school journalism class. Watch at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ike2e3wugk. As she explained in her note, she was unable to borrow an Icelandic horse, and so had to make do with a Welsh pony. Not quite the same, as anyone who has ridden an Icelandic horse will tell you.

Just published!

Coming in September

About Me

I am the author of one young adult novel and six books of nonfiction.
I write about Iceland and Vikings, science and sagas. My books combine extremes: medieval literature and modern archaeology, myths and facts. They ask, What have we overlooked? What have we forgotten? Whose history must not be lost?
If you'd like me to give a talk at your bookclub, store, school, or other venue, just let me know and we'll see what we can work out.
I live in Vermont with my husband, the writer Charles Fergus, and our four Icelandic horses and one Icelandic sheepdog. I offer tours to Iceland through the company America2Iceland.com
Visit me at nancymariebrown.com